A group of people living within kilometers of Mount Agung walked into the crater of the volcano on Friday, September 29, just as thousands were fleeing ahead of an expected eruption. According to the Sydney Morning Herald Balinese priest Jero Mangku Ada walked to the peak of the mountain to pray that the volcano would not erupt. Experts have said an eruption could be imminent. In pictures and video shared to Facebook, Ada can be seen at the volcano summit with others. In one picture he appears to be praying. According to The Guardian more than 140,000 people had been forced to evacuate. Credit: Facebook/Mangku Mokoh via Storyful

September 30th 2017

a year ago

/display/newscorpaustralia.com/Web/NewsNetwork/Network News/National/

This is the closest look inside the Mount Agung volcano in Bali.Source:Facebook

THE world has just had its closest look inside a giant, rumbling volcano that is expected to erupt at any moment.

A group of Indonesian priests have trekked to the very top of Bali’s Mount Agung volcano as increasingly frequent tremors and earthquakes from the “pulsating” beast stoke fears an eruption could be imminent.

Reports indicate several priests have ventured towards the volcano at an altitude of 3114 metres above sea level in an attempt to make a holy offering. But only one priest, Mangku Mokoh, published what he saw, including a giant “hole in the crater”.

Yet in his post, Mr Mokoh said he climbed the volcano “because I’m not sure that Mount Agung will erupt”. He discredited volcanologists and urged his followers,”if you believe in this video please share”.

As the volcano rumbles and shakes, experts say that deep inside, magma is rising.

Explorer and filmmaker Sam Cossaman, told National Geographic while on tour of an active volcano in Vanuatu that the inside is like a “glimpse into the centre of the earth” and “the heartbeat of the planet”.

Mount Agung, about 70 kilometres to the northeast of the Kuta tourist mecca, is among more than 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia. Another volcano, Mount Sinabung on Sumatra, has been erupting since 2010. It most recently erupted last week.

Officials say tourists on Bali, which had nearly five million visitors last year, are not in danger but they have prepared evacuation plans if ash fall from an eruption forces the closure of the island’s international airport.

Indonesia, an archipelago of thousands of islands, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

In Mount Agung’s case, molten rock, which has been accumulating for the past 50 years, is heating up and slowly dissolving the rock above, while the pressure is pushing through the volcanic crevice and finding weak points to penetrate.

Increased temperature in the groundwater is creating steam filled with gases like sulphur dioxide; it’s been steaming away quite strongly over the last week. Dangerous volcanic gases fill the air.

A plume hovers above off the top of the volcano about 500 metres above the crater’s rim.

As it’s doing that, the mountain is shaking, there’s deep volcanic earthquakes - 10-15 kilometres below the surface the rocks are melting, interacting with water and ocean sediment, melting, trying to bubble their way up to their source.

Once they do, that’s when Mount Agung will erupt.

Authorities are trying to convince more than half of the 144,000 people who fled the menacing volcano to return home over the weekend, saying they left areas that are safe.

But the issue for experts attempting to map out a possible eruption timeline in Bali is the fact that no one really knows when the giant, rumbling volcano will blow.

“The sad part about that is often times people have moved back inside the danger zone because they say, ‘it hasn’t erupted, it will be fine’ — and then it erupts,” Emile Jansons, aviation services manager at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) — a section of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, told news.com.au.

Government volcanologists echoed the sentiments last week, warning Agung could erupt at any time following a dramatic increase in tremors from the mountain.

Agung’s last eruptions in 1963 produced deadly clouds of searing hot ash, gases and rock fragments that travelled down its slopes at great speed.

Lava spread for several kilometres and people were also killed by lahars — rivers of water and volcanic debris.

Meanwhile, Australia has sent a naval ship to help evacuate thousands of people from Vanuatu’s Ambae island, where a volcano is threatening a major eruption.

The Vanuatu government announced last week that all 11,000 residents on Ambae — in the north of the Pacific archipelago — would be moved, after the Manaro Voui volcano rumbled to life and rained rock and ash on villages.

“If you’re looking extreme locations it doesn’t get much better than an erupting volcano on Vanuatu,” Jeffrey Marlow, Geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology, told National Geographic in 2015.

The landing ship HMAS Choules departed Australia Saturday and is due to arrive at the Pacific nation midweek, carrying emergency specialists and food supplies.